Eliot’s recently revealed letters to his muse Emily Hale show how much he loved his old friend, but a statement from the poet’s own grave dismisses his feelings and shows Eliot trying to rewrite the story of their relationship, saying scholars.
Hale donated Eliot’s letters to the Princeton University Library more than 60 years ago, instructing them not to be opened until 50 years after Eliot and she died.
The day they were made available at the Ivy League school, Eliot’s statement, written five years before his death, was released under his own instructions.
In it, Eliot downplays his love for Hale.
“I found out that my love for Emily was the love of a ghost for a ghost,” he wrote.
Eliot scholar Frances Dickey, who was one of the first to read the letters at the New Jersey school on Thursday, said it was “unfortunate” that Eliot felt he had to deny his feelings for Hale.
“That seemed a little harsh,” Dickey said. “She was his muse for years.”
Letters to Hale from 1930 in the first of 14 boxes show Eliot professing his love for her.
“They are extremely passionate,” Dickey said. “It’s really more than I expected. They are very emotional and claim that she inspired a lot of his poetry. She clearly played a very important role in his poetic life.”
Dickey said it has become increasingly clear that the “hyacinth girl” in “The Waste Land,” Eliot’s most famous poem, is Hale.
Among the boxes of letters is a manuscript Hale wrote about their relationship. Her account and his early letters follow the same story, Dickey said.
In his statement, Eliot admits that he once loved Hale.
“I fell in love with Emily Hale in 1912,” he wrote. He told her that two years later.
“I have no reason to believe, given the way this statement was received, that my feelings were reciprocated,” Eliot wrote.
He married his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, in 1915, a year after his declaration. The two had a tumultuous, loveless marriage marred by Haigh-Wood’s mental illness and alleged infidelity. They broke up in 1933.
“Emily Hale would have killed the poet in me; Vivienne nearly killed me, but she kept the poet alive,” Eliot wrote.
Hale eventually developed feelings for Eliot, but the poet writes that over time he realized “how little Emily Hale and I had in common”.
“It might be too harsh to think that what she liked was my reputation rather than my job,” he wrote.
Eliot scholar Anthony Cuda called that a “cold and untrue statement”. “He was chasing her,” he said. “His earliest letters were fiery declarations of love. It’s not like she was chasing him.”
In other letters, Eliot comments on the pain and happiness of intimacy, according to Dickey, even confessing his craving for alcohol and revealing details about his private life.
Hundreds of letters still need to be read; only a few copies are on display in the library at a time, and no copies are available online.
There are a few different reasons why Eliot is trying to rewrite history, the scholars say. Hale donated the letters while the two were still alive, and Eliot feared they would be released before the embargo date. Eliot had ordered that the letters he had received from Hale be destroyed.
“He looked back on this and felt ashamed and ashamed of the openness and vulnerability he allowed at the time,” Cuda said. “He tried to limit the damage.”
But he also wanted to protect his second wife, Valerie, whom he calls his one true love.
“But it’s a strange protection,” Cuda said. “He was so devoted to Valerie and she to him. What the Emily Hale letters reveal (Valerie) was not the unique love of his life. He had a unique and tense experience for her.” The letters could reveal much more about Eliot’s private and poetic life and are already making waves in the literary community.
Cuda called them “everything we could have hoped for”. “What we want to do as consumers of other people’s lives is just understand them,” he said. “As usual, Eliot will not be simplified.”
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